Though Sedgwick nods towards lesbian literary history in this passage, she underplays its important status in her discussion of homosexual panic

Many people associate the term Victorian with the notion of sexual repression.

Indeed, our fascination with the Victorian erotic unknown seems to derive largely from depictions of such anomalous practices as child prostitution and sexual slavery or of the paradox of wilfully maintained sexual ignorance and unchecked libertinism.

Drag queens allow a break in the heteronormative gender guideline while also reinforcing the social image of what it means to look like a woman.

Figures of scientists and engineers emerge during the nineteenth-century as icons of masculinity distinct from either the figure of the magician or the figure of the military hero.

Mistresses neither took oaths, participated in public life nor intervened in assemblies.